Thursday, June 10, 2010

I'm at the "90-50-10" celebration at BNL now, honoring the 90th birthday of Ernest Courant, 50 years of the AGS, and 10 years of RHIC. Quite an impressive lineup, with 5 Nobel Prize winners in the audience and several speaking as well. It's hard to overstate the importance of Courant's work in the 1950's, which allowed the develop of modern accelerators, both fixed target and colliders.

I had an amusing role in helping design the logo for the event, when I proposed a poster idea (OK, this was the second draft..):

which ended up looking like this in the end:

I still like the original idea, but it's flattering that it survived as much as it did. Anyway, I'll report a bit more on the talks later (maybe much later, but I promise!)

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Very neat: a heat map of NYC, extracted from Flickr geotagging information. Red indicates photos taken by "locals" (people who stick around) and blue indicates "tourists" (people who don't). The yellow ones can't be easily put in ether category (still thinking through this one). But amazing how a simple criterion like that can basically get it right.